Feed

I was wrong. I read the first bits of Mira Grant's Feed before the 2011 Hugo deadline, but not enough to actually get the feel of it. And so I voted for Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear first for that year's Hugo. However, now that I've finished it, I can report that Feed is just a killer book --- in both senses of the word. Grant managed to tell a really compelling story about life in the mid-twenty-first century after the zombies have come. She manages to get enough Joss Whedon-style snarkiness in, particularly in the interactions between our point-of-view character Georgia (as in "George Romero") and her brother Shaun (as in "...of the Dead"), and their sidekick Buffy. Together they run a web site where Georgia is in charge of the news (the "Newsies"), Shaun is in charge of exploring the outside world and occasionally chasing zombies (the "Irwins", who give out an annual award called the "Golden Steve-o"), [As a tossoff, she notes about Shaun, "A good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke look death defying and suicidal." Those of you who have seen Shaun of the Dead will note that scene sounds eerily familiar.] and Buffy runs the poetry and story side of the house (the "Fictionals").

     Then she leavens it with some swipes at thinly disguised versions of current political figures, like the congresswoman from Minnesota running for president who is described as a "publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change." But it's not all lightness: she provides an excellent political thriller as a base, in which people die badly. And she manages to write it with some gut-wrenching passages like the quote below from Shaun's blog.

        She rounded out the rest of the "Newsflesh" trilogy with Feed and Blackout, both also highly recommended.

"If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: Go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms."